Al Agnew

Exactly! I doubt if anybody has had the opportunity to test every reel on the market today side by side. In my original test of my reels, I tried to make everything as equal as possible, same rod, same lure, same line, same conditions. However, there are probably hundreds of reels I didn't test. It always amuses me when somebody asks for a recommendation on just about anything, and a bunch of people say that the model they happen to own is GREAT. Define "great". They haven't tried many of the other options, so how do they know their model is better than any of those they haven't tried? Plus, different people are looking for different things in a reel. I want good, smooth casting, light weight, and durability. But how do you test for durability without using a reel for years until it throws craps. And the right rod is something that way too many people fail to even think about. Your rod should match the lures you are using. If it does, it doesn't make much difference which reel you're using. If it doesn't, the best reel is only going to go so far to overcome that disadvantage.

Really, a personal best is often kind of a fluke event; if it wasn't, it wouldn't be your personal best. I don't fish to catch personal bests in the first place. I fish first to get fish to take my fly or lure; that is the first "drug", not "the tug is the drug" for me. Second, my goal is never to catch a personal best, but to catch fish that are big for the waters I'm fishing. Last year I caught the biggest smallmouth I've caught in a while, 21.5 inches and fat enough that it was probably over 5 pounds. Was catching a 20 incher a few days later a let-down? Nope, because 20 inches is kind of the gold standard in Ozark stream smallmouth, and I was completely happy to catch it. At the same time, I never take the 12-15 inchers for granted; they are always a nice catch. By the way, it's been a running joke for a while between me and a couple friends about the terminology of the size fish you catch. There are "nice'uns", "good'uns", "big'uns", and "holy-crap-look-at-the-size-of-that-fish'uns". When it comes to stream bass, nice'uns are 12-14 inches, good'uns are 15-17 inches, big'uns are 18-20 inches, and anything over...

There are some long, dead pools, but most of the pools are short to medium length. Not a lot of fast water, but I'd say it's a bit less of a dead pool/short riffle river than the Bourbeuse. There is a pool about a mile long about halfway between E Highway and Coles Landing, a couple long pools between Cole's and Blackwell, and the pool that starts just below the Blackwell bridge is a good mile long. Some pretty impressive bluffs.

I just floated it last week down to Blackwell. No hazards. The lowwater bridge at what used to be Cole's Landing (private) is open and clear; sometimes the box culverts going under it can be blocked by logs but it's completely clear of logs now and you can take any of the three culverts under it. A massive log jam a couple miles below the Highway 67 bridges that was a big problem a couple years ago has a path through it now that is easy to negotiate in all but high water. An old lowwater bridge a couple miles above Blackwell is now on a nearly dry side channel, and the main flow goes around and over the steepest rapid in this stretch, but it's short, open, and deep; you'll just encounter foot high standing waves in it. You'll like the scenery, but there is a lot of slow water.

Black-spotted topminnow and juvie green sunfish...the shiner I'm not sure of, would have to examine it closer. Black crappie are actually beautiful fish!

Given how rough I am on my canoes, I've done quite a bit of repair work to Royalex. The skid plate kits you buy for Royalex are pretty thick; they would fill in the hole fairly well, without any sharp edges. You can also buy Kevlar cloth and G-Flex Epoxy instead of the kit if your worn area is bigger than the Kevlar skid plates. For smaller repairs, I usually just fill in the worn area or gouge with plastic epoxy; it isn't the best repair but it will last years. I've filled in gouges with JB Weld, but it's brittle enough that it doesn't work well for larger areas. For the big worn hole that's down to the inner ABS foam layer in the canoe you just bought, it's important that the whole area is DRY before trying any sort of repair work. Water seeps between the outer vinyl skin and the inner foam and soaks into the foam if the canoe is left out in the weather, so you need to bring it inside if possible or have it under a roof where it will never get wet for a while to get that area as dry as possible.

Ah, yes, my old stomping (or paddling) grounds. Yup, that smell continues from Flat River Creek to well past St. Francois Park in the summer. I still can't figure out why so many people swim in it at St. Francois Park and elsewhere; I'll get in it to cool off in hot summer weather, but never submerge my mouth or nose. It has been that way for many years; it seems the Park Hills and Desloge sewage treatment plants are not quite able to keep up with the demand. It does not harm the fish (nor does it make them taste bad--I still eat spotted bass from this section occasionally), but it does combine with the lead mine tailings to produce a really nasty gray-green algae that grows in mats on the bottom and then comes loose from the bottom and floats to the surface, where it drifts down the river in clumps, piling up at every obstruction until you end of with masses of black, smelly crap that might be 6 inches or more thick. The lead catchment structure is called a Newberry Riffle, and is a design that impounds a short section of stream above it without obstructing fish passage. The theory is that lead-infused sediment settles in the stretch of slow water above the structure, where it can be periodically dredged out. I think there were originally plans for several of these along the river, but so far only the one has been constructed. As you said, it forms a dangerous rapid in higher water, and an unfloatable stairstep rapid in lower levels that is a real pain in the posterior to portage.

Well, this discussion went off the rails. Everything I've ever heard or read about heaven and eternal life sounds boring as heck after a few hundred years, maybe a lot fewer years than that. I'm sure I've told this here before, but when you get to be my age you tend to repeat yourself...when you get to be my age, you tend to repeat yourself........... An avid fly fisherman dies, and soon finds himself at the pearly gates. An angel comes and tells him to follow. He takes the angler to an absolutely gorgeous trout stream. The weather is perfect, there are big trout rising everywhere. The angel hands the angler a fine fly rod and a box of beautiful hand tied flies, and tells him, "This is your stretch of river. You can fish it for as long as you wish. Nobody else will intrude." The angler ties on a fly that appears to match the abundant mayflies. He picks out a rising trout and makes a perfect cast. The drift is beautiful. The trout takes solidly. The battle is spectacular, but finally the angler nets a beautiful 20-inch rainbow, admires it, and releases it. He picks out another rising trout. Another perfect cast and drift, another take, another battle, another 20 inch rainbow. The next cast is pretty sloppy, but it doesn't matter, the nearest trout takes, same kind of battle, another 20 incher. After a couple hours, the angler has gone through every fly in his box. He's purposely made terrible casts and dragged the fly along the surface, or let it sink when it gets waterlogged. Doesn't matter. Every cast gets a take. Every battle results in landing the fish. Every fish is 20 inches. Finally the angler walks back up the hill to where the angel is watching, and says, "Well, this has been terrific, but is there another stream we can try? Maybe one with more challenging fish, or bigger fish?" "Nope," says the angel. This is your assigned stream. It's the stream you will fish for all eternity." "Wow," says the angler. "I mean, it's great fishing but I thought Heaven would be more interesting than this." The angel looks at him sadly, and replies, "Who told you this was Heaven?"

Actually, I think it's an attempt to slow the spread of the invasive rusty crayfish. If you don't transport ANY crawdads to different waters, you can't transport the bad ones.

It seems the freshwater fisheries world is in the throes of a "splitter" mentality these days. I think we're up to 19 species of black bass at this point, or is it 13? And now THREE species of smallmouth alone! Fact is, fish are not the most mobile of critters, and are limited to what they can swim to; they can't go overland to breed with the population in the next river system. So it stands to reason that there will be differences in widespread species like longears based upon which major river system they are in. There are certainly some differences that can be seen if you have two side by side to compare. And genetic studies bear it out to at least some extent. I suspect that if the genetic studies are done of ANY widespread species that lives in several different major river systems, they will find significant genetic differences in different populations. But is this enough to make them different species, or just different subspecies or strains?

Yeah, I've met and talked with a few of them. Roland Martin was the biggest surprise...really nice guy to talk to when for some reason I didn't expect him to be.

Another unbelievably stupid species MDC pushed back in the day is multiflora rose. The land we just sold was thick with it. Had no bush honeysuckle or bradford pears, but that multiflora rose was evil. The land we just bought and live on now has quite a bit of bush honeysuckle close to the road, but hardly any multiflora rose. Gonna have to do battle with the bush honeysuckle.

Well, back in those days I watched those shows because they were about fishing, but didn't really much care for any of the personalities on them. Ensley was marginally okay, Virgil was pretty much a doofus, I thought. Jerry was the best of them, but wasn't often on the TV channels we could get. But I was pretty sure my dad and I knew more about catching big bass than any of them. When the bass guys started getting shows, I thought they were mostly okay. Probably enjoyed Jimmy Houston the most...he just seemed to do nothing but have fun, while some of the others were way too serious.

Absolutely. As a river landowner myself, I can see both sides. But I bought my riverfront property (in two states) knowing that for the privilege of owning it, I would have to put up with public use. In the old days, landowners didn't mind people using the rivers flowing past their property, or thought it was public water. But in more recent years, and especially as more people (with proportionally just as many pinheads) began to use the rivers and new people bought up land along them, there have been many instances of stream stretches being closed off, informal accesses shut down, and all because either the landowner was influential in county politics or the law enforcement people would rather shut it down than do their jobs patrolling it. We are losing access, folks. For every parcel of land MDC has acquired and put in a nice boat ramp, there are two or three bridge crossing being closed to access.

Here is the exact wording in the MO Supreme Court case that settled public stream access in Missouri: "this river is navigable in fact by canoes, rowboats, and other small floating craft of similar size and nature, but that it is not navigable in fact by larger boats and vessels." Maybe not an exact definition, but not difficult to understand.

I highly doubt that ANY reading of the case will support "hiking for miles down a dry gully". There are NO states where such is the case. In Montana, you must be able to legally access the stream at some kind of public access, or through a landowner, in order to fish it, but once you've legally accessed it, you can fish it for as far upstream or downstream as you wish as long as you stay within the high water mark. Most states with permissive public access rules are some variation of that; in no state can you cross private property to reach the stream. Missouri and Arkansas are a bit more restrictive than Montana, in that the stream must be floatable in small craft before the public has an easement to float and fish it. You are correct that refusing to hear a case is different from siding with anglers, though. Had the Supreme Court taken the case and made a decision that affirmed the state supreme court decision, it would have probably been binding upon all other states. As it is, each state will have to litigate separately in order to gain the rights the NM Supreme Court decided for that state.

Sure glad to see Mitch back in the lure business. His original HD Craw design was a game changer, and I have no doubt that these lures will also be great. The Shark Tail looks terrific in the water from the video I saw.

Yeah, it's probably been 20 years since it was an usable access. The last time I used it was with the MDC biologist in charge of Big River; we did electroshocking upstream from the access. It was not open to the public then, but he got permission to use it. Many years ago, I got to know the old guy who owned it. What I didn't know was that his family was gradually moving him out of taking care of the place. I got permission from him to use the access for $5 one day, and went back a few days later to give him some t-shirts with my artwork on them in hopes that he would let me use the access without charging me for it. The next time I went to use it, another guy who I think was his son or son-in-law stopped me and told me the access was closed, and that the old guy shouldn't have given me permission to use it the last time. Apparently he had been taking money from people (and my t-shirts!) when he no longer had the authority to let people in (his house was before you got the old farmhouse at the end of the road, so I guess everybody stopped there.)

There are two private low water bridges between the park and Blackwell. One is the bridge at what used to be known as Cole's Landing. It was once a fee access but is completely private now. In normal flows you can float under it with no problem, except that sometimes a bunch of driftwood piles up against the bridge and blocks the culverts going through it. The other is a couple miles downstream. The river splits just above this bridge, and for the last 10 years or so there has always been enough water to float the left channel, which bypasses the bridge but has a pretty sharp drop that can generate some 1-2 foot standing waves in springtime water flows. There usually isn't anything you have to portage, but up until last summer there was a bad log jam a couple miles above E Highway that required portaging. I think Jason of Wolf Head Outfitters finally got a passage sawed through it, but the big tree that anchors the whole jam is still there, so it could easily get jammed up again.

Nobody knows the answer other than the coaches and team, and they have been completely quiet on it. He dressed but was not at the pre-game shootaround tonight. If he's back to not contributing again, this team's ceiling just got lower. Tonight was a gutty win. With Gomillion and DeGray out with injuries and Shaw not getting a lot of minutes because Gates doesn't trust his defense and rebounding, add in Mosley not playing, and they are down to a seven man rotation plus Shaw. They can't sustain the kind of up tempo offense and full court pressure defense they need to play for the rest of the year with that limited a rotation; they badly need Mosley, Gomillion, and DeGray.

The mountain streams coming out of the Absaroka/Beartooth Mountains, tributaries of the major rivers I named, are mostly heavily timbered. In fact, they are small and difficult to negotiate in many places, with heavy brush and timber hanging over the creek. Most are full of small, stupid native cutthroat, though one of them I've fished has, weirdly, mostly brown trout up to about 15 inches. You can drive up some of them through private land which contains some beautiful meadow stretches, but no easy access. Small rivers like the Boulder and Shields and Gallatin flow though farmland on their lower sections, with banks mostly lined with cottonwoods and occasional bluffs. Up in the park, there are all kinds of streams. Some are in heavy forest, some flow through wide open meadows, some in deep, narrow canyons. Streams like Hellroaring Creek, one of my favorites, are simply gorgeous, flowing through mixed meadows and forest. On the other hand, the Lamar River up in the Lamar Valley is nearly all meadows, very few trees anywhere...it's good fishing but you have to be on your toes all the time, because if the grizzlies aren't intruding upon your fishing the bison are threatening to trample you...and then you hear a couple wolves howling up on the mountainside and you begin to realize that you might not be the apex predator there!

Depending upon how close you live to I-29, you're probably 5 hours closer to Montana than I am when I'm in Missouri, since I'm down in southeastern MO. It takes us about 21 hours drive time to reach Livingston MT. We live part of the year in Livingston partly because that part of Montana is gorgeous, partly because there are all kinds of opportunities for fly fishing, and partly because of Montana's enlightened stream access law; if you can legally get on it, you can go anywhere you can reach on it. No other western state offers so much water open to the public; it drives me nuts to go to Colorado and see all the long stretches of private water that I can't fish. The stretch of I-90 between Hardin east of Billings and Three Forks west of Bozeman gives you easy access to the Bighorn, Stillwater, Clarks Fork, Boulder, Yellowstone, Gallatin, Jefferson, and Madison rivers, along with dozens of small streams coming out of the mountains. The difficulty isn't in finding a place to fish, it's in narrowing down your choices to a manageable number. Heck, in Livingston you're only an hour away from Yellowstone Park, with all the terrific streams you can fish within the park. And that's only one part of Montana; there are others just as good. My problem is that it's so nice in my area that I don't feel the need to do much exploring over the rest of the western half of the state. One very important thing to remember...water levels in Montana are not like water levels in Missouri. I'm constantly seeing people asking about visiting Montana to fish in June. That is the WORST time to go there. The spring runoff starts in early May most years, and in most years runs through June. While you CAN find fishable water during the runoff, your choices are severely limited, because all but the tailwater rivers are likely to be high and muddy. And for the wading angler, many streams can still be high and difficult to wade even through July. If you want to have good wading, plan to go in August and the first half of September (and if you don't mind taking chances on bad weather at times, through September and into October, or in April before the runoff starts). The only thing June has going for it is the salmon fly hatch, which is iffy...on most streams it happens when the water is high, and float fishing is the only way to go. You can often get a good salmon fly hatch on fishable and wadeable water on the Madison, but everybody and his dog knows it, so it's combat fishing. On most of the larger streams, you won't really need to worry about bears, but on those streams within Yellowstone Park and the small mountain tributaries, bear spray and PRACTICE USING IT is a very, very good idea.

In the past, when the mill dams on Big River were still intact, the Byrnes Mill mill dam was the farthest downstream, and formed a barrier to upstream travel, so it was the best spot for walleye on the river in late winter/early spring. I believe it deteriorated before the Rockford Beach mill dam, and then Rockford Beach became the best spot. I haven't heard of it being a good spot in recent years; I suspect that fish can get past it in early spring water flows. The only intact dam left is at Byrnesville, and there is a fish passage through it. I grew up on upper Big River, and never saw a walleye in the upper half of the river until about 15 years ago, when all the mill dams were in disrepair.

Yeah, I didn't even mention the tiff mining, which screwed the river up about where it started to recover from the lead mining. Back in 1975, a buddy and I headed to the river one morning to float from Blackwell to Washington Park. It had rained a lot the night before, but when we crossed the river in Desloge it was in good shape. Well, we crossed it at the old Blackwell bridge while heading on to Washington Park to drop off a vehicle, and it was pure red mud! A tiff mine tailings dam had burst the night before up on Mill Creek, which comes into the river just above Blackwell, and had dumped a huge amount of tailings into the river, so much that it pretty much killed everything from there to where the Mineral Fork came in and diluted it enough. I did a two day float from St. Francois Park to Washington Park the next year, and caught over 100 bass above Blackwell and exactly 2 bass below. It took about 10 years for that stretch to fully recover.

I hadn't heard about the Newberry Riffle being removed...I'm trying to remember the last time I floated that section. It was sometime during late summer, and it was still there. If it actually worked the way it was supposed to and was doing some good, it would have been a simple matter to make it easily passable by paddle craft; just pick a line through it and remove about four strategic boulders. I've had mixed feelings about it. The upper end of the pool it formed used to be a fast run that always held a really big smallmouth; I've probably caught a dozen 20 inchers there over the years. But the "dam" deepened and slowed it, and I hadn't caught a big one there since it was constructed. But the pool held a good bunch of nice fish once the thing was built.